The general secretary of the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC), Bishop Mvume Dandala, has called on Canadians to join in the condemnation by African churches of the role that developed nations play in perpetuating corruption in Africa and throughout the developing world.
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“The matter of corruption is a matter that requires all churches to act together because there are two aspects of corruption,” said Bishop Dandala, in an interview with the Canadian Anglican Journal during a visit to the country earlier in this month.

“First, it is challenging our own people to actually confront this problem head on. There’s another problem and that is the fact that even the international world has developed values of wanting to deal corruptly when it cuts deals with people from the developing world,” he said.

Bishop Dandala urged that churches outside of Africa also had a responsibility to speak out against the issue of corruption, saying: “We’re not just speaking to the African people.

“It becomes the worldwide community that needs to speak to all the structures that deal with the people of the developing world, holding them responsible for their actions,” he said.

The suspicion of corruption in the governments of developing nations has many of the world’s wealthier nations countries reluctant to grant an unconditional cancellation of debt in these nations.

But Bishop Dandala, leader of the AACC since 2003, said: “It is totally wrong for people to feel that corruption is an African phenomenon. Greed is a phenomenon that affects the whole of humanity.”

|QUOTE|The AACC leader told Canadian church leaders at a meeting in Toronto, including Ellie Johnson, acting general secretary of the Anglican Church of Canada, that, “We need each other if we are going to overcome the problems of the world, a globalised world, a world that’s putting markets first.”

He said: “We, as the ecumenical family, should more and more say that God’s creation comes first, relationships with people and with our environment come first.”

The issue of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa has also, according to Bishop Dandala, knitted the various church denominations in the continent tightly together. He said that churches ‘lulled’ back into denominationalism after the end of apartheid in South Africa but that the African churches “realised quickly that you do not sustain an impact as a church if you just want to act denominationally.”

|TOP|Bishop Dandala appealed to Canadian churches to join in a wider ecumenical movement to ensure that Christianity “does not break down the social bonds that have made the African people withstand so much of the socio-political and economic bonds that have been perpetuated against the continent of Africa.”

He concluded with a warning to churches to not perpetuate “an extreme form of individualism”, engaging only in private sin and private salvation.

“The temptation is always there for the church to just celebrate the growth of their numbers without worrying about what kind of impact they have on the communal life of our people,” he said.

The All African Conference of Churches was established in 1963 as a fellowship of 168 national churches in 39 African countries.